The root cause of Beethoven’s plethora of health issues has been a source of fascination to many.
— have had their DNA analyzed . But these genetic treasure troves can provide information that “no anatomical examination, after two hundred years, could provide,” says Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, who was not involved in the study.
Begg partnered with Beethoven enthusiasts to ask the owners of these locks to part with a few strands. The team was able to gather samples from eight locks said to have been snipped from 1821 to 1827. Those common features — along with a clear record of who owned these separate locks of hair over the centuries — makes Begg “extremely confident” that these locks are Beethoven’s.
The researchers used some of the best-preserved locks to reconstruct the composer’s genome. This analysis didn’t uncover any genetic markers for deafness or intestinal issues. But the team did identify several risk factors for liver disease, including a variant of the geneThose risk factors alone shouldn’t have doomed Beethoven. But the scientists also found traces of the hepatitis B virus, which damages livers, in one of the strands reportedly collected shortly after Beethoven’s death.
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